Peter / Tanya Steel, a violent male transvestite, was jailed in March 2012 for 17 years after being found guilty of rape, inflicting grievous bodily harm, burglary, unlawful wounding and damaging property. Steel’s ex-partner Clare Lawton, a male who identifies as a trans woman, was also found guilty of these charges, minus the charge of damaging property.

The sentence component for rape (from the 17 year total sentence) is to be indeterminate, reflecting the seriousness of the offence and the danger Steel is considered to pose to the public.

The female victim had witnessed Lawton, 43, and Steel, 38, enter her friend Steven Butler’s flat in August 2011 with a Samurai sword and beat him unconscious over a grudge involving another woman. She was then abducted and taken to Steel’s flat in Cambridge where they told her they were hired killers before making her undress and raping her.

In his sentencing remarks Judge Gareth Hawkesworth said their crimes had been sadistic and that it was hard to imagine that they belonged to the “same human race”.

The website Gender Identity Watch details here, that following media coverage of the trial, trans activists including Paris Lees and Sarah Brown authored a letter to a newspaper complaining that their coverage called Lawton a man, rather than focusing on the fact that Lawton and Steel are extremely violent sex offenders who are a danger to both women and men.

Not one national newspaper article covering Lawton and/or Steel’s crimes is available online, despite the fact these crimes were committed fairly recently and that the long sentences reflect the severity of risk the pair pose to the public.